THE HOWLING FRANCHISE: Screaming at the hairy moon…
Matt Adcock (@Cleric20) tackles the beast of very questionable quality inside
There are probably film franchises which spend decades carefully curating their mythology, bringing characters in ways that work, dropping fan-service breadcrumbs and easter eggs as though somebody, somewhere, knows what’s Canon.
Then there is The Howling, a series which begins in 1981 as a smart, nasty, genuinely rather brilliant Joe Dante satire about television, trauma and the monsters living amongst us. The effects and general vibe making it a killer double bill with An American Werewolf in London.
From then on though this lycanthrope franchise chews through its own restraints and bounds off to hang out with Transylvanian sex-witches, Australian marsupials, bargain-bin gothic murder mysteries, vampire-versus-werewolf carnival shenanigans and, eventually, the sort of country-and-western bar where the availability of line dancing seems to take precedence over whether anybody has remembered to put an actual werewolf in the movie.
Ok… It’s a full moon, the moors are calling… Let’s go:
THE HOWLING (1981)
Joe Dante's original remains a delicious early-'80s horror feeling of talented people being allowed to make something grim, clever and properly weird without anybody in a franchise strategy meeting demanding to know which character might support a streaming spin-off. Dee Wallace is great as Karen White, a television news reporter traumatised after helping police corner serial killer Eddie Quist, who is subsequently sent off to a supposedly therapeutic retreat called The Colony.
What still gives The Howling its teeth isn't simply the monsters but the thoroughly cynical view of the supposedly civilised humans standing around them. Dante and screenwriter John Sayles have great fun with television culture, self-help gurus, sexual repression and people's endless ability to turn horror into content. Rob Bottin's transformations still possess that magnificently tactile wrongness which CGI has spent decades trying unsuccessfully to replace. Faces swell, jaws stretch and human anatomy is remixed live on screen.
Darkmatters: ö ö ö ö ö
5 traumatised TV anchors unexpectedly turning into giant hairy truth bombs out of 5. This is the full-strength stuff: funny, nasty, technically glorious and still considerably cleverer than rest of the ‘franchise’!?
HOWLING II: YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF (1985)
If Dante's original is an urbane beast in a suit, Howling II is the same animal three nights into an Eastern European stag weekend, wearing leather trousers it doesn't remember buying and attempting to explain occult genealogy to Christopher Lee while Sybil Danning presides over a werewolf orgy in the next crypt.
To say there is a tonal lurch between the first two films that genuinely takes some believing would be fair. The previous film's haunted final moments launch a globe-trotting supernatural adventure involving ancient wolf cults, Stirba the immortal werewolf queen, titanium weaponry, punk gigs, ritualistic sex and the sight of Christopher Lee maintaining magnificent actorly dignity while surrounded by material which would have made lesser men simply stare into the middle distance.
The film's greatest achievement is perhaps that it never once seems embarrassed by itself. Philippe Mora directs with the energy of somebody who has been told there are no consequences, while the soundtrack pounds away, Reb Brown shouts at things and Lee explains adding unwarranted credibility. Then come those end credits, which repeatedly replay Danning ripping off her top in a manner so enthusiastic that the film itself seems to have stolen the remote control and become trapped in a rewind loop.
Darkmatters: ö ö ö½
3½ Christopher Lees grimly refusing to admit he is trapped in an erotic werewolf fever dream out of 5.
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HOWLING III: THE MARSUPIALS (1987)
Philippe Mora apparently finished Howling II, surveyed the smoking wreckage and thought the problem was that nobody had yet investigated the evolutionary possibilities of Australian werewolves with pouches, so The Marsupials relocates everything Down Under and proceeds to create a wildlife documentary.
Our focal wolf is Jerboa, a young woman escaping an isolated community who winds up involved with a filmmaker while scientists, military types and assorted interested parties slowly discover that Australia contains an entire strain of alternative lycanthropic life. Mora pushes the comedy harder here and the result is much broader than either of the previous films.
Feels like a petting zoo surrounded by scenes which resemble Mad Max having a nervous breakdown.
Darkmatters: ö ö ö
3 baffled Australian wildlife experts out of 5. Deeply daft, strangely charming and precisely the kind of movie that rewards watching with tequila.
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HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE (1988)
AGary Brandner's original novel had been heavily reworked for Joe Dante's film, so Howling IV returns to something closer to the source material, which means we are now watching the fourth film in a franchise that is also, in practical terms, another version of film number one. Nobody appears terribly troubled by this, least of all the movie, which simply introduces writer Marie Adams, sends her to the suspiciously named town.
This is much slower and cheaper than Dante's film, with fewer jokes and considerably less satirical bite, but there is a decent clammy atmosphere to Drago. The budget occasionally shows through the wallpaper, but when the transformations arrive they have a wonderfully gloopy practical nastiness, including one especially memorable sequence where a human body seems less to transform than to melt into biological soup before hairily rebuilding itself.
Darkmatters: ö ½
1½ quietly liquefying authors out of 5. Not remotely essential, but respectably eerie and packing enough goo to keep the practical-effects faithful awake.
HOWLING V: THE REBIRTH (1989)
Then, The Howling decides it wants to become Cluedo. A group of assorted strangers are invited to an ancient Hungarian castle which has only recently reopened after centuries of grim history, heavy snow cuts them off from the outside world and people begin dying one by one while everybody attempts to work out which guest is secretly the werewolf. It's such a simple shift in approach that I'm surprised more of the sequels didn't try it: instead of worrying about escalating the monster action it just has the characters bounce between paranoia and fairly understandable terror as the bodies start accumulating. There is a pleasantly Agatha-Christie-meets-video-shop quality to proceedings, and although the film hardly possesses the resources of peak Hammer, it understands that half the pleasure of this sort of thing is watching a bunch of mutually suspicious people realise that one of them is considerably furrier than advertised.
The Rebirth is probably the most straightforwardly enjoyable sequel after the original because it has a clear gimmick, sticks with it and doesn't introduce a single marsupial reproductive organ.
Darkmatters: ö ½
1½ castle guests shedding on the furniture out of 5. An underseen little gothic-em-up bitten by insanity.
HOWLING VI: THE FREAKS (1991)
By film six the series has arrived at the travelling carnival, which is where every long-running horror franchise eventually goes when it has exhausted laboratories, castles and isolated communities. The Freaks introduces Ian, a drifter burdened with the usual full-moon employment difficulties, who falls into the clutches of R.B. Harker, the sinister owner of a carnival who spots Ian's lycanthropic condition and rather cruelly decides it would make a splendid attraction. This is already promising territory, but then the film reveals that Harker is a vampire and suddenly we're watching werewolf versus bloodsucker years before Underworld!?
Bruce Payne enjoys himself enormously as Harker without tipping completely into pantomime. There are echoes of Freaks, Universal monster movies and carnival gothic throughout, although naturally filtered through the budget and aesthetic expectations of early-'90s straight-to-video horror.
Darkmatters: ö ö
2 carnies in need of flea treatment out of 5. Probably the late series' sleeper entry, with more atmosphere and empathy than anybody had reasonable grounds to expect.
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HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995)
And then we reach the country (low)bar.
There are bad sequels, there are cheap sequels and there are films whose very existence feels like somebody discovered a loophole in the legal definition of cinema; New Moon Rising exists somewhere in that third category. A mysterious drifter arrives in a Californian town, locals talk, drink, play music, dance and occasionally remember that they are nominally participating in the seventh entry of a werewolf franchise. The quantity of line dancing becomes so substantial that you begin to suspect the lycanthropy is merely a subplot in a documentary about regional nightlife which has been aggressively re-edited by someone holding the franchise rights.
The really extraordinary bit is the film's determination to tie together Howling IV, V and VI through reused footage and retroactive exposition. Scenes from earlier instalments appear, characters are discussed, connections are painstakingly explained and the movie behaves as though audiences worldwide have spent sleepless years demanding clarity on the precise canonical relationship between The Original Nightmare and The Freaks. It is continuity repair at the level of somebody attempting to fix a collapsing conservatory with Blu Tack while a country band plays ten feet away.
I found myself becoming weirdly fascinated by it. Not entertained exactly, because words have meanings, but fascinated in the way of seeing someone who obviously doesn’t like Werewolves make Howling film!?
Darkmatters: ½
½ increasingly alarmed line-dancing extras out of 5. An extraordinary object which should probably be preserved in a vault so future civilisations can understand what happened to direct-to-video horror in the mid-'90s.
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THE HOWLING: REBORN (2011)
Sixteen years later the beast rises again and immediately discovers that Twilight has happened. This time the franchise is rebooted around teenager Will Kidman, whose imminent graduation becomes complicated by the discovery that he is developing lycanthropic tendencies, while the girl he fancies, Eliana, gets pulled into a supernatural conflict involving a distinctly more youthful breed of werewolf. The tone is glossy, earnest and extremely aware that supernatural romance has become a thing.
There is no Joe Dante media satire, no Christopher Lee occult road trip, no Australian evolutionary anthropology, no gothic castle mystery and, thankfully, absolutely no line dancing. Instead we get a competent teen horror in which puberty and lycanthropy are treated as adjoining inconveniences, complete with school corridors, romance, angst and young people discovering that adulthood involves considerably more body hair than anyone warned them about.
Darkmatters: ö ½
1½ hormonally overwhelmed teen wolves out of 5. Slicker than most of its ancestors, considerably less interesting than the lunatic ones and crying out for Christopher Lee to appear halfway through and explain that everything is actually the work of Stirba.
SO WHICH HOWLING ACTUALLY HOWLS and which are just HOWLERS?
Watching the whole series back-to-back is a wonderfully unhealthy reminder of how franchises used to mutate before cinematic universes became corporate engineering projects. Nobody had a twelve-year roadmap for The Howling; somebody simply kept finding enough money to make another one and, crucially, often seemed determined not to make the same movie twice. The results range from genuinely excellent to barely classifiable, but even the disasters have personality, even if they make you want to punch yourself in the face to stay focused, which is more than can be said for plenty of far more expensive franchise entries currently algorithm-ing their way onto streaming services.
Werewolf mythology has always been about the respectable exterior giving way to something messier, nastier and much less socially acceptable underneath, and few horror franchises have demonstrated that principle quite so literally in their own production history. The Howling begins as prestige cult horror and gradually transforms, movie by movie, into something nobody involved at the start could possibly have anticipated; the mostly embarrassing results speak for themselves...
Darkmatters says: come for Rob Bottin's still-extraordinary flesh-ripping transformation effects, stay for Sybil Danning's immortal wolf queen, marsupial birth horror, Hungarian castle paranoia, vampire carnies and the only horror sequel I can immediately recall where extensive line dancing becomes a legitimate endurance test.
Inconsistent… Spectacularly. Mostly terrible? Beyond argument. But boring franchises are ten-a-penny, whereas this one is certainly packed with oddities, and makes Hellraiser’s even longer running efforts look classy :)
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